The religious or moral system of a people being the highest manifestations of its intellectual tendencies, we see that the study of religions enters quite naturally into anthropology; it is a part of this comparable study of the human mind, unfortunately too much neglected, but which begins to take a place worthy of its importance in the world of science.[176] We do not wish to discuss theological or religious questions, the anthropologist ought to leave them to others. His duty is to endeavour to put himself outside the narrow circle in which nature has placed him; to forget, as much as possible, his inclinations and personal sentiments; to look around him; to put the world in one view, and to endeavour to be the sole spectator of the same. Then a curious phenomenon will strike his gaze,--the chains of mountains and the rivers which separate the various races of mankind, will also separate different religions. Like the sea which breaks on the shore, every belief has seen its disciples, armed with the sword, or with the pacific weapons of persuasion, stop at certain limits, over which they are not permitted to pass. Of course, we only speak here of true proselytism, of real progress in religion in its form and spirit. Humboldt and Bonpland saw, one day, in the Cordilleras, a savage crowd dancing and brandishing the war-hatchet round an altar where a Franciscan was elevating the Host. Such neophytes are only called Christians in the _Annales de la Propagation de la Foi_,--they are not converts in the opinion of the anthropologist. Pure monotheism seems always to have been the religion of the Semitic race. Most European nations, on the contrary, have professed from antiquity, a polytheism or a pantheism, more or less disguised, more or less acknowledged. In fact, by the side of those nations of Asia and Europe, where civilisation and religious ideas appear to have simultaneously been developed, although in different directions, we find other people who have neither religious ideas, nor gods, nor any kind of worship.[177] Three vast regions of the earth, inhabited by people still in a savage state, appear to have remained, up to the present day, free from religious beliefs; these are Central Africa, Australia, and the country around the North Pole,--that is to say, the three parts of the world which are most difficult to explore,--the only parts which have even not yet been thoroughly examined. And this is one consequence of this want of exploration; it supposes a sort of sequestration from the rest of the world, which has not even succumbed to civilisation by this contact and imitation of which we have already spoken. Let us admit that relations were established by these people with their neighbours; they would soon have imported from the foreigner conceptions which would even then have never taken a form, on account of the small portion of intellect which nature had given to them.